Friday, September 11, 2015

One of my all time favorite photobooks is William Eggleston's The Democratic Forest. Published in 1988, the work is a sequence of around 150 images which form an almost autobiographic
narrative, beginning with pictures of Eggleston's home territory in the
Mississippi Delta and radiating out across the USA.
In an afterward in the book Eggleston talks about his process, a view that resonated with me then and does now. “I was in Oxford, Mississippi for a few days and I was driving out to
Holly Springs on a back road, stopping here and there. It was the time
of year when the landscape wasn’t yet green. I left the car and walked
into the dead leaves off the road. It was one of those occasions when
there was no picture there. It seemed like nothing, but of course there
was something for someone out there. I started forcing myself to take
pictures of the earth, where it had been eroded thirty or forty feet
from the road. There were a few weeds. I began to realize that soon I
was taking some pretty good pictures, so I went further into the woods
and up a little hill, and got well into an entire roll of film.Later, when I was having dinner with some friends, writers from
around Oxford, or maybe at the bar of the Holiday Inn, someone said,
‘What have you been photographing here today, Eggleston?’ ‘Well, I’ve been photographing democratically,’ I replied. ‘But what have you been taking pictures of?’ ‘I’ve been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.’ ‘What do you mean?’‘Well, just woods and dirt, a little asphalt here and there.’

Today, Eggleston's output is being reconfigured in a series of bookworks from Steidl that in my view focuses on quantity rather rather than quality. The revisited Democratic Forest is a ten-volume set containing more than 1,000 photographs and is drawn from a
body of 12,000 pictures made by Eggleston in the 1980s. Following an
opening volume of work in Louisiana, the ensuing volumes cover
Eggleston's travels from his familiar ground in Memphis and Tennessee
out to Dallas, Pittsburgh, Miami and Boston, the pastures of Kentucky
and as far as the Berlin Wall.

I've always liked the story, Henri Cartier-Bresson talking to Bill Brandt. HCB said to Brandt (it may have been the other way around) how many great pictures did you make last year, Brandt replied, oh about twelve. HCB responds, ah well you always did exaggerate.
Eggleston's reconfigured Democratic Forest with 1,000 images made over ten years gives a great picture output of 100 images a year. Assuming that is, that all the pictures in the work are great. Let's wait and see.

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz